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This is a guest post by Jenny Richards. Jenny has worked in the financial sector for 12 years. She is a certified CFA and currently earns a good income working for a business that deals in car title loans in San Jose California.

Every company, at one point or another, needs to employ someone with a financial background. Financial positions could vary in a company from accountant, finance administrators, advisors and planners, CFOs and others. The need for a position and the prestige within a company is usually dependent on the size of the company.

Financial jobs are usually dependent on market cycles. At the moment, small loans are in demand among many consumers as the market is still reeling from the effects of the financial crisis. As such, companies that offer car title loans are growing because they are dealing in the types of loans that consumers can afford. Such growth occasions an increase in financial jobs.

Below are tips that will help you grow your finance career: Read more…

I would like to take a pause from the normal financial news and information of this site and, because it is really my only vehicle for this type of writing, talk about another topic — Fred Phelps. Phelps, the odious leader of the uber-odious Westboro Baptist Church, died this week. He and the Westboro Baptist Church made headlines for their “God Hates Fags” signs and protests at soldiers’ funerals.

Phelps wasn’t a polarizing figure. He was a unifying figure. Liberal or conservative, we could all hate Phelps. He was an equal opportunity hater and hated us all right back.

But, might there not be a little — about half — of Phelps in all of us? That’s my question — do we come off as Fred Phelps? Check out social networks, or watch the news and you will see and hear how ideology has split us into two ideological camps. We create templates for our hate. The same cruel jokes that liberals heaped onto George W. Bush and conservatives a decade or so ago match up pretty well with the anti-Obama, anti-liberal crowd today. We post our meme updates on Facebook and we call each other Rupugnican and libtards. All of which plays well to our peer groups. Liberals preach to the liberal choir, conservatives to theirs, just like Phelps came off to his choir.

To each other, though, we start to look like a more targeted version of Phelps, but with just a bit less self-awareness.

And there are a lot of reasons to keep this going. By losing ourselves in our ideologies, we place ourselves in demographics, which makes it easier for news organizations, publishers, and entertainers to spoon feed our hate and fears. Follow the money, reporters always say, and there’s a lot of money to be made in this.

We may make some friends with our re-spewing of the hate industry that most of us call politics, but we’re going to lose some, too — maybe even some good friends. We won’t make much headway and converting people to our ideas — because it’s really about preserving our self-interest, not at finding solutions that everyone can live with.

But, ultimately, we’re losing ourselves. We’re becoming soulless caricatures. When we cling to our ideology, at the expense of our humanity, we are Fred Phelps.

Many people have problems with hedge funds and big investment conglomerates. They rake in billions of dollars and live like rock stars.

People hate them so much they protest constantly, occupying this and occupying that.

But, I don’t have a problem with them. In fact, the chants of sympathy for the poor and working class and hand-wringing over income inequality are typically a cover for the protesters who are simply jealous of the big financiers. Had they stumbled onto these opportunities, they would be in the same penthouse, driving the same Porsche.

Bitcoin, an alternative currency that is challenging the rights of states to be the exclusive provider of currencies, continues to be hotly debated. Are they wave of the future for currency, or just the next Internet-based bubble? Is Bitcoin a viable form of currency, or simply another form of speculation?

Before you can answer the question, though, you need to find out just what the heck a Bitcoin is. Here, then, is a comprehensive list of information sources, as well as sources of insights, predictions and tutorials on Bitcoin. This is a perfect place to start if one of your resolutions this year is to start exploring — and possibly investing in — this alt-currency.

The course is divided into several sections. The Core Lecture Path serves as a comprehensive introduction for beginners on all relevant topics necessary to have a deep understanding of Bitcoin including why Bitcoins have value, why they can be used for anonymous transactions, the current economy of Bitcoins, how they are made and distributed as well as speculation.

Take a course in Bitcoin from Khan Academy, one of the leaders in alternative online education. In this course, you’ll get to hear answers from an expert on questions such as: “What are some general advantages to using Bitcoins in a transaction vs. using Dollars, Euros, Pesos, etc.– i.e., what is the point of their existence? As if the concept of paper money isn’t hard enough to comprehend; now, digital money.”

The direction Bitcoins will take in 2014 is impossible to predict. There are too many variables and not enough historical data to offer some notion of how Bitcoins will react to different market conditions.

It was a great idea to become independent and to create a democracy in the new world, dominated by archaic colonialism and monarchism. However, if it wasn’t for the printing press, those ideas would have never got out. If it wasn’t for the rifle, those ideas would have never been defended.

You might say the American Revolution was the ultimate app.

But what about you? Do you have great ideas on how to save money, invest money, and budget money, but don’t have the resources or tools? Here are a few ways to simplify those tasks and make this July 4th — and every day after that — the day you declare your personal financial independence.

And, by the way, all these apps are Free, just like the founding fathers wanted them to be.

Making a bad investment is one thing, but you don’t know it’s bad unless you can see how bad it really is. SigFig helps you monitor your portfolio — and spot those bad investments. And good ones. Find out more at SigFig.

BillTracker

The BillTracker app helps you monitor your bills and pay them on time. Find out more at BillTracker.

Doxo

Doxo bills itself as a digital file cabinet so you don’t have pesky paper bills floating around mucking things up. You can check out this hand app here.

Forbes Intelligent Investing

Forbes is one of the biggest names in financial news and information. Their Intelligent Investing column is downright educational. You can get a look at the Intelligent Investing app here. Click on the Intelligent Investing tab.

Morningstar Apps

Track all of your investments and study all of your investment ideas with these Morningstar apps.

You do not see the market clearly. No one does. You are peaking through a crack through a wall when you make an investment, or a trade. The mass that blocks your view from true reality is often referred to as “a cognitive bias.” In fact, there isn’t just one cognitive bias that makes up the wall that blocks your view of how things really are; there are dozens.

Cognitive biases are simply thinking shortcuts, ways you process the infinite amount of information that bombards your reality every day. (If you want to impress people, call them “heuristics.”)

Biases aren’t necessarily bad. They are actually forms of pattern recognition — one of the reasons humans remain at the top of the food chain. In fact, you might go crazy if you didn’t have some way to turn the swirling clouds of data that inundate us into sensible patterns. However, if you’re not aware of your own biases and acknowledge that they help you make decisions, these lenses quickly become blinders. Here are a few cognitive biases that might affect how you think about investing.

Anchoring or focalism – this is the tendency to rely too much on one piece of information when making decisions. Some investors have a particular metric when the make their decision and ignore other signs of company performance.

Backfire effect – when something happens to cause you to doubt your belief, you strengthen that belief. Ever buy something after a rapid loss and call it a “buying opportunity”?

Bandwagon effect – just because everyone is buying a house with a high-risk mortgage, you can do the same.

False-consensus effect – the tendency of a person to overestimate how much other people agree with him or her. Just watch any of the financial news networks until you find one that agrees with you.

Information bias – the tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.

Focusing effect – the tendency to place too much importance on one aspect of an event. You may experience this when, let’s say, the Fed makes one move, while there are other economic factors that are just important, and you focus on the Fed’s decision.

Optimism bias – the tendency to be over-optimistic, overestimating favorable and pleasing outcomes.

Pessimism bias – the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of negative things happening to them.

Recency bias – events that just happened seem more important. For example, a company has a good quarter — after a string of lousy quarters — and you focus on the new numbers.

Typically, we don’t suffer from one bias — but dozens. Sometimes, these biases are bouncing around at the same time.

There’s an interesting story that some companies in Japan have banishment rooms. According to Marginal Revolution:

“Basically, banishment rooms are departments where companies transfer surplus employees and give them menial or useless tasks or even nothing to do until they become depressed or disheartened enough to quit on their own, thus not getting full benefits, unlike if they were actually let go. Imagine having to stare at a TV monitor for 10 hours at a time each day, in order to look for “program footage irregularities.” Of course companies would not admit to doing this, and instead will make up generic (or even creative) titles and department names like “Business & Human Resource Development Center” or “career development team”

You’ll see this in American operations, too. Hoping to avoid paying out unemployment compensation, some organizations will try to demoralize and demean employees into quitting on their own.

What’s even more dismaying, employees will stick it out. Apparently, Japanese workers will remain in these banishment rooms. Only 10 percent will leave the company. The rest sit around and scrutinize television for 10 hours a day. A horrible waste of potential. Doubly dismaying: Most studies indicate that employees who are laid off or quit find better jobs: higher paying and more richly satisfying. They tend to perform well in these jobs, too.

So what gives? The Buddha might say it is nothing more than attachment. We are attached to our routines and our relationships. We derive too much of our self-esteem and self-worth from our job titles and the brand of the place where we work, too. I might add that there’s always the fear of the unknown. The saying that comes to mind: The devil that you know is better than the devil you may face in the future.

Somehow, workers become blinded by fear and are unable to see that with unemployment — or even new employment — that new positions bring not just uncertainty, but also opportunity.

What’s your opinion? Do you stay in a bad situation, or do you move on and try a new job? What’s your bottom line?

Rose’s Law gives you some idea of the super-exponential power quantum computers will offer.

A few years ago — for fun — I started to read about quantum computing and quantum information. At the time, I believed that a real quantum computer was decades away, especially since that was what most experts were saying.

But, that’s linear thinking — and technology does not often follow linear progressions. Technology increases exponentially. And it may increase super-exponentially, if the latest quantum discoveries continue to flow from research labs and companies, such as D-Wave.

D-Wave recently announced that Google has signed up as one of their quantum computer customers and Google and NASA are teaming up to develop a Quantum AI lab. In case you don’t realize the implications: that’s friggin’ huge.

Quantum information processes use qubits, which are a lot like the bits of information we’re familiar with in binary computing. But, where a binary bit can be in a 1 position or a 0 position, a qubit can be in a 0 position or in a 1 position or anything in between — at the same time. It’s called superposition. Qubits in superposition are capable of massive feats of calculation. And, the more qubits that researchers learn to entangle, the more powerful these computers will become. How powerful? According to How Stuff Works:

A 30-qubit quantum computer would equal the processing power of a conventional computer that could run at 10 teraflops (trillions of floating-point operations per second). Today’s typical desktop computers run at speeds measured in gigaflops (billions of floating-point operations per second).

That’s pretty powerful. However, most experts say that quantum computers are better for certain computations that classic computers don’t even come close to matching. Because of a quantum computer’s ability to detect observation and its ability to massively crunch numbers, QCs make near perfect devices for encryption and cryptography.

But, in my opinion, sending and receiving secret messages is just the start. We don’t even know the full implications. Just a scattering of headlines this week points to the weird behavior of quantum mechanics stretches our understanding of time and space. Photons that are entangled before they even exist? Making a quantum computer out of good old fashioned silicon? We also see quantum technology mentioned in far-future devices: teleportation, time travel, etc.

Right now we look at the quantum computing age and compare it to the last technological sea change, the internet or dotcom age. Sure, it will make spies happy, but what about us? But, the quantum age may be like nothing on the historic charts, even beyond the civilization-molding steps of discovering fire and agriculture. I look at it more like the discovery of language, instead of discovering how to symbolically talk about reality, though, this quantum language will allow us to actually talk to our reality (or realities).

The Millennial Generation is loosely defined as the generation of Americans born in the 80s or 90s. Obviously, a lucky generation wouldn’t have the exact date of their creation, right? Just like every tool becomes a weapon and every weapon becomes a tool, technology has shaped this generation’s limitations and opportunities as no other.

The National Journal’s main point — although they’re a little wishy-washy about it — is that technology has replaced a lot of the jobs that former generations could access. Computers have increased production and automation has totally transformed the job market. That’s all true, too. And this is just beginning. We haven’t seen nothing yet.

However, the article stumbles a bit on just what advantages that technology has introduced. After all, Millennials have more computer power in their pockets than most university computer labs had in their facilities just a few decades ago. The technology has created turmoil, but every period of massive change has a transition period.

Technology is also starting to break the chains of wage slavery for this next generation of workers. More Millennials can create their own businesses online. They have access to apps and tools that give them the power of dozens of corporations at their fingertips. There are also more ways to earn money–blogs, websites, app development, affiliate businesses, etc.. We can’t forget, either, that more Millennials can arrange their work in ways that just was not possible in previous generations.

When you hear about entropy in science class it’s usually described as a messy bedroom, a completely disordered state. It has nothing to do with intelligence, in fact, it looks like the complete opposite of intelligence.

But, according to a Harvard computational physicist, entropy holds the key to intelligence and — defying the bad reputation thrust on it by millions of high school science teachers — entropy is more like a state of exploration, or even play. It’s an insight that could lead to new technologies and has important implications for econophysics and stock trading, believe it or not.

Alexander Wissner-Gross, who is part of both Harvard’s Institute for Applied Computational Science and MIT’s Media Lab, recently published a paper called, “Causal Entropic Forces,” which, using cosmology as its inspiration, seeks to reveal the “deep connections between intelligence and entropy maximization.”

And that gives us a clue to how it works in finances and trading. Wissner-Gross sees entropy as the universe’s way to explore possibilities and to seize future possibilities as possible. As he tells Io9, it’s a lot like playing Go.

Other Links

Recommended Reading

The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil is the book that started it all. If you want to know about the future, it is the best book I've found. Absolutely fascinating.

Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. This is one of the most popular personal finance books of all time. A must read for anyone who wants to become financially successful.

The Millionaire's Secrets is one of my favorite financial books of all time. It's an allegory about a guy who has a terrible job, and how he overcomes challenges to achieve his dreams.

The One Minute Millionaire is a great book about how to become a millionaire. Written by Mark Victor Hansen and Robert G. Allen, this book combines an inspirational story with practical everyday skills.

The Art of Learning is the fascinating story of Josh Waitzkin, the world champion in both chess and Pushing Hands. His style is mesmerizing, and the strategies for learning are priceless.

The Alchemist is one of the best-selling and most inspirational books of all time. Anyone who has ever had a dream in life needs to read it. Perhaps my favorite book of all time.

Love is the Killer App is a powerful, step-by-step book about how to have a wonderful experience and spread love in any working environment. Think the office has to be a source of bad energy? Think again.

The 4-Hour Workweek is a powerful book full of strategies about how to get more done in less time. For anyone who is looking for leverage or wants to achieve success quickly, this book is absolutely invaluable.